Filtering Noise from Twitter


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Can you have too many followers?

10, 50, 100, 500? There is surely a finite amount of conversations any one person can follow and how well relationships can develop by “drive-by” remarks. It is also true of people following you. How do you provide good value to say a thousand people that follow you?

From a business point of view it is sensible to maintain a smaller volume of followers that are truly interested in your business to keep people engaged and vice versa. The best way to achieve this is to grow organically, which is often a good maxim in business. With the use of APIs (application programming interface) that artificially generate lists of friends you risk becoming a spammer. Much like all interaction with the web it is perhaps wiser to focus on good contributions in your local or national community with content that people want to hear about rather than empty tweets that will often get lost among all the other noise.

Relationship building has become the currency of social media and like any relationship needs to be cultivated, therefore putting a marketing hat on and talking “at” people is not going to cut it in this medium and there won’t be much value gained.

What do you think? Leave your comments.

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2 thoughts on “Filtering Noise from Twitter

  1. This issue is an interesting one to sort out and can become quite thorny when examining it…Although I totally agree that offering true value to your followers is difficult with the “wide net approach”, there is also a strategy that “bigger is better” and that if you have an additional X number of anybody followers there is a chance that one errant tweet might convert a few to check out your website or product/service that you offer. This strategy is analogous to sending out mass mailers–which presumably also include your niche/core market customers–with the same goals of attracting your actual customers and also perhaps a few more that might be predisposed at that moment to read the mailer and act on it.

    The issue, of course, is that direct mail is exactly the opposite of social media marketing so we find ourselves back to where we began. Finally, add to that the perception that the larger the number of followers you have, the more validated you are as an authority or popular tweeter. Our Twitter Elite have all set the bar by accumulating more followers than small countries.

    I think your point of growing organically and yet still posting valuable, targeted posts to your core niche is the way to go.

    We can be assured that the Twitterverse and Twitter services will continue to evolve and offer tools to separate your followers into various groups which will likely change again how we handle “following” and “followers”.

    The challenge for Twitter will be to not lose site of WHY they became so popular to begin with. Less can be more and they proved it. Hopefully they can grow and find ways to monetize the site without losing sight of their roots.

  2. We seem to be the minority with this thought process. I see real estate agents setting up Facebooks; then they post how they’re going to a soccer game with their kids. While that’s great for friends and family I think we’ve intertwined the personal and professional a bit too much. My solution; two facebook accounts and the two shall not meet.

    My niche is working land deals; primarily with builders, developers and investors. My goal is to filter through the masses and overload of information available about real estate and focus on land, zoning, new developments, and other areas of interest that is relevant to my market.

    Blackberry, web site, blogs and email yes; Twitter no. I can’t seem to find the words to twitter properly. I also don’t have the time to stay that connected.

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